photograph by Seth Akgün Fields, 2025
Ben Bernard is a ceramic and sculpture artist born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He received his BFA in ceramics from the University of Oklahoma in 2025. He has served as a Studio Technician while in university, where he cultivated his passion for connection, collaboration, and education. After graduation, he spent the summer at Anderson Ranch Arts Center as an intern in the ceramics department, where he exercised and expanded his interpersonal, technical, and creative skills. His work focuses on the relationship between queerness and thingness.
Artist Statement
Driven by absurdity, my ceramic practice finds itself at the intersection of Queer Theory and Bill Brown’s Thing Theory. My work is precarious, peculiar, and playful. These delicate groupings of mismatched parts examine otherness, spectacle, and functionality. I address the word “queer” itself, meaning twisted, strange, or unusual. Challenging the usual, in my oddities, the rigid becomes pliable, the dull becomes vibrant, and the straight becomes twisted. Saturated colors, odd forms, and a subversion of functionality reference queerness as a defiance of patriarchal rules. I manipulate ordinary objects and present them as not-quite-right. When these strange objects behave out of the ordinary, they exhibit their thingness and queerness. In my work, familiar objects are presented in costume, and everyday things perform in drag. Wheel-thrown, hand-built, and slip-cast objects meet in extravagant, compact collections that expand illustrative forms into three-dimensional space. The twisting and untwisting of materials draw me to the ceramic process. I find working with clay to be the “enqueering” of raw materials. Pulverized stones and metals melt together to cover dry bisque-ware in color and sheen. What was once soft and malleable becomes rough and rigid when introduced to intense heat. Color, strength, and shape may change, but fired ceramic is composed just the same as unfired clay. Decorations and accessories obscure the functions of my vessels and objects. However, colorful distractions do not eliminate functionality; rather, they disguise it and require a new, perhaps inconvenient, action to function as expected. With a change in their relationship to the human subject, these objects become things. When they behave otherwise than usual, these things become queer.